Do you need to be in control? It’s a question I sometimes ask business owners. It’s the kind of question that can make a business owner cringe or break out into a cold sweat. It’s a question that challenges the business owner to be honest with themselves. Do you need to be in control of every little thing?

Business owners wear a variety of hats and learning to let go of some of those hats can be hard. There’s always the notion of it being better to do the job yourself than let someone else do it. The business owner can’t afford to take that kind of attitude. It’s an attitude that can drive people away and stress the business owner out. The reality is that its better to know when to delegate business to other people in order to focus your own efforts on what you do best.

Control is a tricky issue for business owners because we all have to think of the bottom line and more importantly how that will translate into supporting our family and lives. Those issues always need to be acknowledged, but if we also have to consider that quality of life isn’t dictated by just how money you save, but also by your ability to enjoy your life. When I work with business owners, I always look at the relationship the business owner has with not only the business, but the rest of his/her life. A business always needs to be framed in the context of what it supports, in order to understand what is or isn’t working with the business. Not surprisingly sometimes what isn’t working is that need to be in control of everything. When the business owner can acknowledge the need to be in control and more importantly can step back and allow others to do what needs to be done s/he is starting to move into a healthier relationship with his/her business.

Respecting your time is something you need to do because no one else will. What’s important to you? What are your priorities in your life? For example, one of my priorities is my family. Consequently, it’s very important that I make time for them. I know that otherwise I’ll be missing out on time with them, which is not something I want to do.

I find, especially with a home office, that is very important to have a cutoff time, where you won’t do any further work. And you need to stick with that time each day, allowing only for a few exceptions and those should be rare exceptions that only come up occasionally. At the same time it’s important to keep distractions to a minimum so you can get work done, so the boundaries you establish need to work both ways.

What I also learned is how much leadership is really derived from many people instead of just one person. It’s only by communicating and working with people that we can lead a community in a way that is meaningful and helpful to everyone. Working with the different people I met, all of who had diverse backgrounds showed me how important it was to be able to work with them and get to know them as people and representatives of resources I could draw on. By the same token I also wanted to be a resource they could draw on, if they needed to.

I like educational opportunities such as this because it offers to learn and also stretch yourself. Each year I try to find a new educational opportunity I can take part in so that I can grow as an individual and professional. What about you?

I’m an advocate of evaluating and re-arranging business. I actually check my business plan every three months to see what I’m doing well and what can be improved on. By doing that I’m able to focus my efforts and get some results that improve my business. And what I’ve noticed with my business and other peoples’ business is that there is always a need for improvement and for re-arrangement of priorities.

It’s easy to get away from looking at what you need to improve in your business. you get caught up in the daily grind, get focused on customers and then at some point feel dissatisfied with your business and wonder how it came to be that way. But that’s why its important to mark on your calender, every three months, a day that you will spend focusing on analyzing all of your business activities and looking at where you are strong as well as what needs work.

To me such a day is a time for reflection as well as analyzing my business. I reflect on what I’ve learned in the past quarter, and also reflect on what makes my business something I want to continue to do. I know I need to spend time thinking about those things as well as analyzing my business. analyzing tells me what I need to work, but reflection tells me why I’m still doing this business as opposed to something else.

What about you? Do you make time to re-arrange, analyze, and reflect on your business? What do you learn?

To be fair, Facebook has definitely capitalized on the psychological manipulation that is involved in using the like button. They undoubtedly reason that if a person chooses to push the like button about a service or product on a business webpage, then they will be accepting of being contacted by that business. There are two problems with that reasoning however:

1. The like button doesn’t use double opt-in, which makes it spammy. How we know that Facebook isn’t using the double opt-in feature is simple. Once you click the button you’ve given permission for a business to contact you. But with double opt-in, what should happen is that the like button is pushed, and a small window opens asking the user permission for the business to contact. If and only if the user clicks a second time indicating that it’s permissible for the business to

Today’s business mantra is “Always Be Connecting.” And the tools –linkedin, twitter, plaxo, blogs, online discussion groups, online communities, etc.– are flourishing. However, in many business organizations, we find a reluctance to let employees use these tools unfettered.

What’s your take on this issue: Should organizations let their employees have access to social media? Why or Why not?

This is a complicated issue. On the one hand allowing employees to communicate via social media can be an excellent strategy for producing buzz about your business, but on the other hand employees can easily waste a lot of time and sometimes even offend clients because of their activities.

The solution is for companies to engage in using social media, but have clearly defined policies that spell out what appropriate behavior is on social media, as it pertains to the company and representing it on the web. These policies also need to explain how much time can be put toward social media. Finally, while businesses need to accept that social media is something their employees will use, employees also need to understand that it shouldn’t replace workplace productivity.

Also what employees need to recognize is that what they say on social media sites can impact the perception people have about the company. On the other hand, if they have legitimate concerns about the company they may find that social media is an effective leveraging tool to get the company to address those issues. Businesses need to make sure they address employee concerns effectively, and also make it clear that social media isn’t the forum for discussing issues about the company or the clients of the company. It’s a tough issue because the business can only monitor what their employees do, in the end.

The best social media policy for a business to adapt is one where only the people who need to use social media use it, and otherwise the employees stay focused on doing their jobs and sustaining the business, while the business also makes sure to take care of those same employees

I’m thinking here about the occasional game or contest that is used by a company or celebrity. Sometimes this social media behavior is successful, especially if not done in excess and other times, when it is taken too far it becomes annoying to people and the backlash ends up making the behavior unsuccessful.

As a business plans its social media campaigns what needs to be kept in mind is that whatever is done needs to not violate the norms so much that people end up ignoring it and/or labeling the business as spammers. Successful social media behavior may not always be in line with etiquette, but it does keep the etiquette in mind and respects the power of that etiquette.

So what makes successful social media behavior? Something which isn’t overly spammy or advertising, which offers a benefit to other people, and makes it fun to get that benefit, and mostly importantly doesn’t go overboard with the message. The tendency to try and push a message out as much as possible is what ends up creating unsuccessful social media behavior. Plan your time for sending the message and you will get people interested in what you have to offer. Plan your frequency around that time, but don’t overdo it and people will accept it. Offer something of value and people will accept if you break a few norms. But do it with recognition that overdoing it will kill your campaign.

The point of having a filtering process is that it enables you to protect your valuable time and resources for the people who are willing to pay for them. A filtering process is a policy that defines what qualifies someone as your client.

The first qualification is the need the prospect has. The prospect wouldn’t be meeting with you if s/he didn’t have a need.

The Second Qualification is if you can actually address the prospect’s need or need to refer him/her onto someone else.

The Third Qualification is that the prospect is willing to commit/pay for your services. If the prospect hedges on this qualification, then s/he isn’t ready to buy. By hedging I don’t mean asking questions, so much as I mean that the prospect finds the idea of spending money to be problematic. If that’s the case, then instead of trying to convince him/her to do so, simply let it go.

The Fourth Qualification is that the prospect is willing to commit to the necessary time and effort involved in doing their part to make the process work. If I’m hired, one of the things I do is provide accountability for the client’s efforts to integrate what I’m helping them do into their business structure. This means the client has to do some work. If this is intimidating to a potential client, it may be that s/he isn’t ready to go ahead with the proposed work. This needs to be respected, but also serves as a qualifying point.

There can be other qualifications as well. The ones I mention here are part of my filtering process. It’s important you develop your own process so that you can simplify your client intake process and keep your resources for the clients that need them.

I have a confession to make.

I don’t have one and I’m not really eager to get one. You might think as a social media coach that I should have one of these phones with all the fancy gadgets, which makes it the social media equivalent of the Swiss Army Knife, but the reason I don’t have one is pretty simple. I like having boundaries around everything I use or do. To me, it’s more important to have a regular cell phone, with nothing fancy, and have some clear boundaries around its use, then to have it with all the gadgets. Granted I know I could set it up so that I could only send messages on it, but even then I feel like I’m compromising on my boundaries. I want to participate in social media, but I also want some boundaries on that, some moments, where instead of interacting with a digital world, I’m focused on interacting with where I am.

Do any of you put boundaries on your social media usage, and if so what are they?

So what do you do if email is consuming your life, if you find yourself spending more time than you want on email? I’ve found the following tips to be helpful when dealing with email that’s consuming your life.

1. Create a Spam Email account: Use this account for your online purchases, as well as for setting up social networking profiles. All of the spam email that gets generated from shopping online or being involved in social networks can go to that email address. I check my spam email address once a day and it usually just consists of me scanning the email for anything I need to know and then deleting it. Takes a few minutes.
2. Set aside specific times of day to check email: The temptation of keeping your internet browser up and running with access to your email can be overwhelming, especially if you are worried you’ll miss that important email that needs a quick response. The problem with that approach is that it puts you on someone else’s schedule. If you are feeling overwhelmed by email pick a time or two times during the day where you will check it and respond and then only check it at that time. For the rest of the time you can create an auto-message that tells people that you’re busy with business or some reason.
3. Create specific email accounts for specific purposes: I mentioned the spam email account earlier, but it’s also useful to create multiple email accounts for different purposes. For example, I have one email account for family, another for friends, and another for my business. By partitioning my email accounts into specific groups, it’s much easier for me to manage my email time. Additionally by keeping separate accounts I’m able to also keep business information separate from personal information

Your email account shouldn’t run or control your life. By learning to manage you time on it as well as creating accounts for specific purposes you can spend more time focused on other activities and still keep in touch with the people you need to be in contact with.